EPP_PED_Glossary

these sub-species do not appear to be easy to identify reliably. My own opinion is that RP was a convenient fiction, but one which had regrettable associations with high social class and privilege. I prefer to treat the BBC accent as the best model for the description of English, and to consign “Received Pronunciation” to history.

reduction

When a syllable in English is unstressed, it frequently happens that it is pronounced differently from the “same” syllable when stressed; the process is one of weakening, where vowels tend to become more schwa-like (i.e. they are centralised), and plosives tend to become fricatives. The reduced forms of vowels can be clearly seen in the set of words ‘photograph’ (fəυtə rɑ f, ‘photography’ fə(tɒ rəfi, ‘photographic’

-fəυtə( r fik – when one of the three syllables does not receive stress its vowel is reduced to ə. This is felt to be an important characteristic of English phonetics, and

something that is not found in all languages. It is possible that the difference between languages which exhibit vowel reduction and those which do not is closely parallel to the proposed difference between “stress-timed” and “syllable-timed” languages.

register

Several uses are made of this word: in singing, it is used to refer to different styles of voice production that the singer may select, particularly head register and chest register. The term is also used by some phoneticians to refer to similar options in speaking (see voice quality). A further use of the term is in the typology of tone languages: it has been proposed that all tone languages could be categorised either as contour languages or as register languages. In the latter, the most important characteristic of a tone is its pitch level relative to the speaker’s pitch range, rather than the shape of any pitch movement.

release

Only consonants which involve a complete, air-tight closure are properly described as having a release component, which means that only plosive and affricate consonants are to be considered. When air is compressed behind a complete closure in the vocal tract, the release may be one of several different sorts. Firstly, the release may happen when the air pressure is near its maximum, resulting in a loud explosive sound, or it may happen (particularly in final position) that the speaker allows the air pressure to reduce before the release, so that the resulting noise is much less. Since an airstream

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is involved, the release may be egressive (the usual situation) or ingressive (as in clicks and implosives). In addition, the release may be simple or complex. If it is simple, the released air escapes in a rush directly from the oral cavity into the atmosphere (assuming an egressive airstream); if a vowel follows and the start of voicing is delayed we say that the plosive is aspirated. The release is complex if the passage of the released air is modified by some other articulation that follows immediately. If the release is followed by fricative noise produced in the same place of articulation as the plosive closure, we describe the resulting plosive-plus-fricative sound as an affricate. Alternatively, there may be nasal release or lateral release.

resonance

This term is widely used in non-scientific ways, and also with technical senses in phonetics and speech acoustics. In its non-technical sense it is often found in music, especially singing (e.g. “his bass voice had a rich resonance”); in auditory phonetics it is sometimes used to refer to particular sound qualities (e.g. “her l sound has a dark

resonance”). But in acoustic terminology the word is used in a different way. Many people first discover resonance while singing in the bath: singing a particular note creates a powerful “booming” effect, while other notes do not have the same effect. Like bathrooms, vocal tracts have natural resonant frequencies. In speech acoustics, the vocal tract is thought of as a continuous tube with different dimensions at different places along its length. As with all tubes and chambers, it is possible to identify particular frequencies at which there are resonances – these are observable as peaks of energy, or formants. In the case of voiced speech sounds, the acoustic energy generated in the larynx passes through the vocal tract and at most frequencies much of the energy is lost; however, at the few frequencies where the sound wave resonates most of the energy passes through, creating peaks of energy at those frequencies. In the case of voiceless sounds, resonance is more difficult to explain.

retroflex

A retroflex articulation is one in which the tip of the tongue is curled upward and backward. The r sound of BBC English and General American is sometimes

described as being retroflex, though in normal speech the degree of retroflexion is relatively small. Other languages have retroflex consonants with a more noticeable auditory quality, the best known examples being the great majority the languages of the Indian sub-continent. The sound of retroflex consonants is fairly familiar to English listeners, since first-generation immigrants from India and Pakistan tend to carry the retroflex quality into their pronunciation of English and this is often mimicked.

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In American English and some accents of south-west England it is common for vowels preceding r (e.g. ɑ in ‘car’, or in ‘bird’) to be affected by the consonant so

that they have a retroflex quality for most of their duration. This “r-colouring” is most common in back or central vowels where the forward part of the tongue is relatively free to change shape.

rhotic/ity

This term is used to describe varieties of English pronunciation in which the r phoneme is found in all phonological contexts. In BBC Pronunciation, r is only found before vowels (as in ‘red’ red, ‘around’ əraυnd ), but never before consonants or before a pause. In rhotic accents, on the other hand, r may occur before consonants (as in ‘cart’ kɑ rt) and before a pause (as in ‘car’ kɑ r). While BBC pronunciation is

non-rhotic, many accents of the British Isles are rhotic, including most of the south and west of England, much of Wales, and all of Scotland and Ireland. Most speakers of American English speak with a rhotic accent, but there are non-rhotic areas including the Boston area, lower-class New York and the Deep South.

Foreign learners encounter a lot of difficulty in learning not to pronounce r in the wrong places, and life would be easier for most learners of English if the model chosen were rhotic.

rhyme

Rhyming verse has pairs of lines that end with the same sequence of sounds. If we examine the sound sequences that must match each other, we find that these consist of the vowel and any final consonants of the last syllable: thus ‘moon’ and ‘June’ rhyme, and the initial consonants of these two words are not important (of course, we do find longer-running rhymes than this in verse, particularly the comic variety, e.g. ‘ability’ rhyming with ‘senility’, ‘Harvard’ with ‘discovered’).

The concept of rhyme has become useful in the phonological analysis of the syllable as a way of referring to the vowel peak of the syllable plus any sounds following the peak within the syllable (the coda). Thus in the word ‘spoon’ the rhyme is u n, in

‘tea’ it is i and in ‘strengths’ it is eŋθs or eŋkθs.

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rhythm

Speech is perceived as a sequence of events in time, and the word rhythm is used to refer to the way events are distributed in time. Obvious examples of vocal rhythms are chanting as part of games (for example, children calling words while skipping, or football crowds calling their team’s name) or in connection with work (e.g. sailors’ chants used to synchronise the pulling on an anchor rope). In conversational speech the rhythms are vastly more complicated, but it is clear that the timing of speech is not random. An extreme view (though a quite common one) is that English speech has a rhythm that allows us to divide it up into more or less equal intervals of time called feet, each of which begins with a stressed syllable: this is called the stress-timed rhythm hypothesis. Languages where the length of each syllable remains more or less the same as that of its neighbours whether or not it is stressed are called syllabletimed. Most evidence from the study of real speech suggests that such rhythms only exist in very careful, controlled speaking, but it appears from psychological research that listeners’ brains tend to hear timing regularities even where there is little or no physical regularity.

root (of tongue)

The base of the tongue, where it is attached to the rear end of the lower jaw, is known as the root. This has usually been assumed to have no linguistic function. However, it has been discovered that some non-European languages have vowels that differ from each other in terms of quality, and the only articulatory difference between them appears to be that some are pronounced with the tongue root moved forward and some have the tongue root further back.

rounding

Practically any vowel or consonant may be produced with different amounts of liprounding. The lips are rounded by muscles that act rather like a drawstring round the neck of a bag, bringing the edges of the lips towards each other. Except in unusual cases, this results not only in the mouth opening adopting a round shape, but also in a protrusion or “pushing forward” of the lips; Swedish is described as having a rounded vowel without lip protrusion, however. In theory any vowel position (defined in terms of height and frontness/backness) may be produced rounded or unrounded, though we do not necessarily find all possible vowels with and without rounding in natural languages. Consonants, too, may have rounded lips (in w, the basic consonantal

articulation itself consists of lip-rounding): this lip-rounding in consonants is regarded as a secondary articulation, and it is usual to refer to it as labialisation. In BBC pronunciation, it is common to find ʃ, , tʃ, d and r with slight lip-rounding.

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sandhi

The ways in which speech sounds influence each other when they are neighbours is of great interest to contemporary phoneticians and phonologists (see assimilation and coalescence), but the subject is also one which interested the Sanskrit grammarians of India (who introduced the term) over two thousand years ago. The notion of sandhi is used mainly in the area between morphology and phonology, and is not much used in the study of pronunciation. It is most commonly found in discussion of tone languages and the contextual influences on tones.

schwa

One of the most noticeable features of English pronunciation is the phonetic difference between stressed and unstressed syllables. In most languages, any of the vowels of the language can occur in any syllable whether that syllable is stressed or not; in English, however, a syllable which bears no stress is more likely to have one of a small number of weak vowels, and the most common weak vowel is one which never occurs in a stressed syllable. That vowel is the schwa vowel (symbolised ə),

which is generally described as being unrounded, central (i.e. between front and back) and mid (i.e. between close and open). Statistically, this is reported to be the most frequently occurring vowel of English (over 10% of all vowels). It is ironic that the most frequent English vowel has no regular letter for its spelling. The name schwa comes from Hebrew, which does have a symbol for this sound.

Many foreign learners of English have difficulty in learning to pronounce schwa.

secondary articulation

In classifying consonants it is usual to identify the place of articulation of the major constriction; however, in the case of most consonants it is possible to add an additional stricture at some other point in the vocal tract. A simple example is liprounding: English ʃ, for example, is often pronounced with rounded lips, and in this

case the rounding is a secondary articulation (where the primary articulation is the post-alveolar fricative constriction). Velarisation is another secondary articulation: in this case the back of the tongue is raised while a more extreme constriction is made elsewhere. This mechanism is used extensively in Arabic for the production of the “emphatic” consonants, and in English is the means for giving a “dark l” its distinctive quality.

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segment

Phoneticians and phonologists disagree about segments: when we analyse an utterance, we can identify a number of phonological and grammatical elements, partly as a result of our knowledge of the language. Consequently, we are able to write down something we hear in words separated by spaces, and (with proper training) transcribe with phonemic symbols the sounds that we hear. However, when we examine speech sounds in connected speech closely, we find many cases where it is difficult to identify separate sound units (segments) that correspond to phonemes, since many of the articulatory movements that create the sounds tend to be continuous rather than sharply switched. For example, pre-consonantal n sounds in English (e.g. ‘kind’

kaind) are often almost undetectable except in the form of nasalisation of the vowel preceding them; sequences of fricatives often overlap, so that it is difficult or impossible to split the sequence ʃs in ‘fish soup’, or fθs in ‘fifths’. As a result, some

people believe that dividing speech up into segments (segmentation) is fundamentally misguided; the opposite view is that since segmentation appears to be possible in most cases, and speakers seem to be aware of segments in their speech, we should not reject segmentation because there are problematical cases.

semivowel

It has long been recognised that most languages contain a class of sound that functions in a way similar to consonants but is phonetically similar to vowels: in English, for example, the sounds w and j (as found in ‘wet’ and ‘yet’) are of this type:

they are used in the first part of syllables, preceding vowels, but if w and j are pronounced slowly, it can be clearly heard that in quality they resemble the vowels [u] and [i] respectively. (See also contoid and vocoid.) The term semivowel has been

in use for a long time for such sounds, though it is not a very helpful or meaningful name; the term approximant is more often used today. Americans usually use the symbol y for the sound in ‘yes’, but European phoneticians reserve this symbol for a

close front rounded vowel.

English has words which are pronounced differently according to whether they are followed by a vowel or a consonant: these are ‘the’ ði or ðə and the indefinite article ‘a/an’, and it is the pre-consonantal form that we find before j and w. In addition,

“linking r”, which is found in BBC and other non-rhotic accents, does not appear before semivowels. It is by looking at evidence such as this that we can conclude that as far as English is concerned, j and w are in the same phonological class as the other consonants despite their vowel-like phonetic nature.

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In French there are three sounds traditionally classed as semivowels: in addition to j and w there is a sound based on the front rounded vowel y (as in ‘tu’, ‘lu’); this semivowel is symbolised ɥ and is found in initial position in the word ‘huit’ ɥit (eight) and in consonant clusters such as frɥ in frɥi (‘fruit’). The IPA chart also lists a semivowel 2 corresponding to the back close unrounded vowel ɯ. Like the others, this is classed as an approximant.

sentence stress

The main question that is asked in studying so-called sentence stress is which syllable (or word) of a particular sentence is most strongly stressed (or accented). We should be clear that in any given sentence of more than one syllable there is no logical necessity for there to be just one syllable that stands out from all the others. Much writing on this subject has been done on the basis of short, invented sentences designed to have just one obvious sentence stress, but in real life we often find exceptions to this. In a sentence of more than five or six words we tend to break the string of words into separate tone-units, each of which will be likely to have a strong stress. For example:

If she hadnt been rich | she couldnt have bought it

In addition we find cases where syllables in two neighbouring words seem to be equally strongly stressed. For example:

Ive \burnt /most of them. (with pitch fall on ‘burnt’ and pitch rise on ‘most’)

Given that (in English, at least), sentence stress is a rather badly-defined notion, is it at least possible to make generalisations about stress placement in simple sentences? It is widely believed that the most likely place for sentence stress to fall is on the appropriate syllable of the last lexical word of the sentence: in this case, “appropriate syllable” refers to the syllable indicated by the rules for word stress, while lexical word refers to words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. This rule accounts for the stress pattern of many sentences, but there is considerable controversy over how to account for the many exceptions: some linguists say that the sentence stress tends to be placed on the word which is most important to the meaning of the sentence, while others say that the placement of the stress is determined by the underlying syntactic structure.

Many other languages seem to exhibit very similar use of stress, but it is not possible in the present state of our knowledge to say whether there are universal tendencies in all languages to position sentence stress in predictable ways.

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sibilant

It is sometimes necessary to make subdivisions within the very large set of possible fricative sounds. As explained under fricative, one possible division is between those fricatives which make a sharp or strong hissing noise (e.g. s, ʃ) and those which

produce only a soft noise (e.g. f, θ). In English we use the sibilant sound ʃ to command silence (e.g. in a classroom). Some other cultures use s, but it is hard to imagine anyone using f or θ for this purpose.

slip of the tongue (speech error)

Much has been discovered about the control of speech production in the brain as a result of studying the errors we make in speaking. These are traditionally known as “slips of the tongue”, though as has often been pointed out, it is not usually the tongue that slips, but the brain which is attempting to control it. Some errors involve unintentionally saying the wrong word (a type of slip that the great psychoanalyst Freud was particularly interested in), or being unable to think of a word that one knows. Many slips involve phonemes occurring in the wrong place, either through perseveration (i.e. repeating a segment that has occurred before, as in ‘cup of key’ for ‘cup of tea’) or transposition (the slip known as a Spoonerism), as in ‘tasted a worm’ instead of ‘wasted a term’. My favourite example of a Spoonerism is one I heard myself on the radio recently, where the speaker said ‘hypodeemic nerdle’ haipədi mik n dl- instead of ‘hypodermic needle’ haipəd mik ni dl- – stressed

syllables of the two words were interchanged. Such slips apparently never result in an unacceptable sequence of phonemes: for example, ‘brake fluid’ could be mispronounced through a Spoonerism as ‘frake bluid’, but ‘brake switch’ could never be mispronounced in this way since it would result in ‘srake bwitch’, and English syllables do not normally begin with sr or bw.

Some researchers have made large collections of recorded speech errors, and there are many discoveries still to be made in this field.

slit

In a fricative made by forming a constriction between the tongue and the palate, the hole through which the air escapes may be narrow and deep (groove) or wide and shallow (slit). (See groove.)

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soft palate

Most of the roof of the mouth consists of hard palate, which has bone beneath the skin. Towards the back of the mouth, the layer of bone comes to an end but the layer of soft tissue continues for some distance, ending eventually in a loose appendage that can easily be seen by looking in a mirror: this dangling object is the uvula, but the layer of soft tissue to which it is attached is called the soft palate (it is also sometimes named the velum). In normal breathing it is allowed to hang down so that air may pass above it and escape through the nose, but for most speech sounds it is lifted up and pressed against the upper back wall of the throat so that no air can escape through the nose. This is necessary for a plosive, for example, so that air may be compressed within the vocal tract. However, for nasal consonants (e.g. m, n) the soft palate must

be lowered since air can escape only through the nose in these sounds. In nasalised vowels (such vowels are found in considerable numbers in French, for example) the soft palate is lowered and air escapes through the mouth and the nose together.

sonorant

Many technical terms have been invented in phonology to refer to particular groups or families of sounds. A sonorant is a sound which is voiced and does not cause enough obstruction to the airflow to prevent normal voicing from continuing. Thus vowels, nasals, laterals and other approximants such as English j, w, r are sonorants, while

plosives, fricatives and affricates are non-sonorants.

sonority

It is possible to describe sounds in terms of how powerful they sound to the listener; a vowel sound such as a is said to be more sonorant than the fricative f, for example. It

is said that if we hear a word such as ‘banana’ as consisting of three syllables, it is because we can hear three peaks of sonority corresponding to the vowels. Some phonologists claim that there is a sonority hierarchy among classes of sound that governs the way they combine with other sounds: in descending order of sonority, we would find firstly open vowels like a, then closer vowels (e.g. i, u); “liquids” such as

l, r, followed by nasals, fricatives and finally plosives (the least sonorant).

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spectrogram, spectrography

In the development of the laboratory study of speech, the technique that has been the most fundamental tool in acoustic analysis is spectrography. In its earliest days, this was carried out on special machines that analysed a few seconds of speech and burned patterns on heat-sensitive paper, but all spectrography is now done by computers. A spectrography program on a computer produces a sort of picture, in shades of grey or in a variety of colours, of the recorded sounds, and this spectrogram is shown on the computer screen and can be printed. With practice, an analyst can identify many fine details of speech sounds. The cover of English Phonetics and Phonology has a spectrogram on the cover, of a male voice (mine) saying ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’, and you can see an explanation of this in the section called ‘About the Book’ on this website.

It is important to get the terms right, though they are confusing. The picture is a spectrogram, while the analysing device used to make it is a spectrograph.

spreading (lip)

The quality of many sounds can be modified by changing the shape of the lips; the best known example is lip-rounding (labialisation), but another is lip-spreading, produced by pulling the corners of the mouth away from each other as in a smile. Phonetics books tend to be rather inconsistent about this, sometimes implying that any sound that is not rounded has spread lips, but elsewhere treating lip-spreading as being something different from neutral lip shape (in which there is no special configuration of the lips).

stop

This term is often used as if synonymous with plosive. However, some writers on phonetics use it to refer to the class of sounds in which there is complete closure specifically in the oral cavity. In this case, sounds such as m, n are also stops; more precisely, they are nasal stops.

stress

Stress is a large topic and despite the fact that it has been extensively studied for a very long time there remain many areas of disagreement or lack of understanding. To

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